Who’s a Jew? In the UK, Judges Decide

November 8, 2009

The case before Britain's Supreme Court involved a 12-year-old student's application to one of London's publicly financed Jewish high schools. (The UK has almost 7,000 publicly financed religious schools, representing Judaism, the Church of England, Catholicism and Islam, among others.) Under a 2006 law, the religious schools can give preference to applicants of their own faiths, using criteria set by a designated religious authority.

In this case, the applicant, identified in court papers as "M," was an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert. M would be considered Jewish under many common standards. But the school defines Judaism under the traditional Orthodox definition; because M's mother converted in a progressive, instead of an Orthodox synagogue, neither she nor her son are considered Jews under Orthodox Jewish law. The high school turned down M's application.This case turned on whether the school's test of Jewish identity was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M's mother rather than whether M himself practiced Judaism.

The court concluded that basing school admissions on whether one's mother is Jewish is by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was "benign or malignant, theological or supremacist," the court wrote, "makes it no less and no more unlawful."

In many cases, I tend to think that Americans can learn from our British cousins. In this case, they have a good deal to learn from us. Courts should not be in the business of deciding who counts as Jewish. As we remove bricks from the wall of separation between church and state, we can expect more of this kind of nonsense in American courts.

Comments:

#1 Keith Harrison (Guest) on Monday November 09, 2009 at 12:54pm

Shame on the UK parliament for ever passing a law that allows publicly financed schools to preferentially admit students with particular religious affiliations.

#2 Simon (Guest) on Tuesday November 10, 2009 at 11:18pm

The UK school system is truly a mess as regards religion.

Mostly it stems from many of the primary schools having been owned by churches in the distant past.

These days most of them are 100% state funded, with staff paid by tax dollars (well tax pounds).

Yet they can (and do) discriminate on religious grounds in both hiring and admissions policy. In some cases staff are compelled to take part in Christian worship in order to keep their tax funded jobs.

My local primary school proudly announces it has a “Prayer box”, to which my first reaction was thinking “how on earth will they teach my child critical thinking skills”.

Afraid the current governments approach, rather than start to address the thorny issue of equity in school building was to build a load of new schools in partnership with anyone who would punt up some cash, including some rather dubious religious organisations.

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Derek C. Araujo is Vice President and General Counsel of the Center for Inquiry, director of CFI's legal programs, and CFI's Representative to the United Nations. He graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in physics, and earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where he served as a Senior Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. During his college years, he was the founding President of the Campus Freethought Alliance (now CFI On Campus) and of the Harvard Secular Society.